>Well, I've never seen a compiler that was better than a typical>assembly coder, but the truth is that the costs of coding in assembly>don't pay for the benefits.

Most programs that I write are not CPU-bound anyway. Either they are
structure-crunching programs for which main memory is the bottleneck,
disk-crunching programs for which I/O is the bottleneck, or interactive
programs where most time is spent waiting for the human even with
optimisation turned off.

I'm still waiting for the time when J. Random User actually wants to
run specint as part of their normal day's computing...